BEA Systems is expected to announce on July 12 the availability of WebLogic Server 9.2, the latest version of the company's Java application server.

In addition, San Jose, Calif.-based BEA also will unveil new portal and development software—WebLogic Portal 9.2 and BEA Workshop for WebLogic 9.2—company officials said. Together the new products give BEA more ammunition for its arsenal of SOA (service-oriented architecture) tools.

Guy Churchward, BEA's vice president of engineering, said BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 is a Java Enterprise Edition-based portal server with new tooling, federation, community enhancements and standards support.

BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 features standards-based portlet federation based on the WSRP (Web Services Remote Portal) standard and includes support for syndication of portal books and pages; personalized delivery; performance optimization; and service life cycle governance, company officials said. The software also features support for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

In addition, "We've added pre-built portal templates in Workshop so you can do better portal development," Churchward said.

BEA also announced a new community framework for WebLogic Portal 9.2, new portal life cycle management capabilities and upgrade wizards to enable customers to upgrade the portal domain from older versions of WebLogic Portal to the new one.

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New features in BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform 9.2 include support for the Eclipse open-source application development platform. The software features Eclipse 3.1-based tools for SOA components, Web services, Web applications, WebLogic Portals and Java EE development, according to the company. The new version of Workshop also features upgrade wizards.

Meanwhile, new features in WebLogic Server 9.2 include enhancements to support zero downtime and the ability to upgrade individual nodes in a cluster without having to take the entire cluster offline, company officials said. BEA also made improvements to its hot-swappable application deployment capabilities, Churchward said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.